Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- > Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had.
Hate to be a downer, but this has been done before.
- But by a 16 year-old Mexican female?by gblargg
- for sure, a whole bunch of videos on youtube of various people using acoustics to put out fire. Including MythBusters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2niANODOvJcby keithnz
- very cool! Can we get a link to a not terrible website with real information?by bentt
- > Performing security verification
> Verify you are human
Does anyone else command + w on first sight of a cloudflare screen?
by nomilk - Bold of you to assume there is real information behind this.by cwillu
- > Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández is 16 years old and has an idea no one else had.
...meanwhile, some folks at George Mason University were doing this back in 2015[1]:
> The fire extinguisher uses low-frequency sound waves to douse a blaze. Engineering seniors Viet Tran and Seth Robertson now hold a preliminary patent application for their potentially revolutionizing device.
by ssl-3 - It’s frustrating that the site wrote that. I’d wager a taco that she never made that claim.by joeypickles
- US military showed a version in 2012 [1], and there is a DARPA report[2]
That said, it's a solid student project. I'm sure she'll do well at university.
[1]: https://www.ifsecglobal.com/uncategorized/soundwaves-a-new-p...
[2]: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...
by Anduia - Oooh.. from the title I thought this was about an extinguisher for when your guitar catches fire. Makes more sense now
- When an oil well goes off, high explosives can be used to extinguish it. Maybe this is the same principle.
- Paul Neal "Red" Adair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adairby johnohara
- Not exactly acoustic but reminds me of a high school science project we had one year, something along the lines of put out a candle with a contraption. My partner and I rigged up a balloon to be popped by the candle, and the balloon pop blows out the candle. Probably not an original idea, but I don't think any other group in the class tried a similar approach. Worked like a charm.by kevin_nisbet
- Basically a small scale version of using explosives to interrupt and extinguish oil well fires [0].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/physicsgifs/comments/5omaxc/oil_wel...
by rtkwe - Infobae has more information (in Spanish) and a video demonstrating the fire extinguisher:
https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/08/27/se-puede-apagar-el...
by commoner - Well, a search for "youtube acoustic fire extinguisher" indicates it has already been invented a few times by people all over the world. The most interesting video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvnCQg4w4o8
- I'll bet that high school girl's science was better than what's in that youtube (it doesn't set a very high bar)by fsckboy
- Watching that dude is like watching a child doing science and then using AI to explain the result. If he makes someone curious enough to do experiments on their own it's still a win though.by z3t4
- It's kinda a throw-away remark in the middle, but I thought it was really cool to realize that speakers produce an on-axis net-blow and an off-axis net-suck.by im3w1l
- There is a saying that ideas are cheap. Only delivery matters.by nicce
- Was looking for a video on this specific work, but only found this [1] where the English translation seems AI-generated. It reminded me of thermoacoustic refrigeration which I found cool (heh) when I had encountered it many years ago - where the compression and rarefaction of sound waves is used to pull out heat. The fire extinguisher seems to operate on a different principle though - it needs to generate a specific kind of turbulence to push out oxygen from the fire site.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGO7Jdfll7c
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoacoustic_heat_engine
by abhgh - I wonder if she got the idea from https://www.sonicfiretech.com/
- This exists and we still put out fire with spraying water?
Why do we live in stone age and work on slop machines instead?
by ozozozd - Wow, must be the same school that keeps pumping out students who invent water powered cars and machines that turn plastic into gasoline. HN with another YouTube shorts tier front page submission.by gos9
- My favorite was the kid who invented the cool clock.by adamrezich
- My favorite was the student who demonstrated small, leaf-like solar panels on a tower, and claimed that somehow they were more efficient than a single panel.
No. Not possible. Not even going to do the math. Dumb. Somewhat more wind-resistant... unless you add up the support structure weight AND the loss of efficiency when the "leaves" are wind-deflected.
But "Green!", so it got attention.
by IAmBroom - My favorites are:
"Power a light with a lifted rock": Actually does work and you can buy this product, but it's a dimmer light for less time than the inevitable marketing diagrams indicate. Not useless but the fawning news stories over the science fair prodigy always makes this sound like an unbelievably brilliant solution rather than a rather niche hack even in the poor rural parts of the world. In the 2020s a standard solar panel, battery, and LED light are much better in every way and far more flexible.
"Provide power for a poor rural village from a kicked soccer ball": An absurdly tiny amount of power, at the cost of creating a soccer ball that is soft and doesn't move when you kick it very much, precisely because it's extracting energy from the kick and that energy isn't available to be kinetic energy. No child would ever play with this ball. Have still seen this idea at least three times now despite the fact that if the reporter spent 15 seconds with the actual ball they'd realize it's a complete non-starter.
"Science project demonstrates new way to kill $PATHOGEN": It turns out killing things in a petri dish is really easy. It means nothing about human health outcomes in a body. In fact pretty much anything about a pathogen in a petri dish - improving resistance to something, destroying resistance to something... it's really easy to do lots of things in a petri dish.
"Water from the air": Doesn't work in practice because the place this needs to be deployed to is precisely the place that doesn't have water in the air. It does work in places that have water in the air but those places also don't need super expensive condensed water when they have water already. I personally live in a place where humidity is basically 90-100% every day in spring, summer, and fall. We don't carefully capture our dehumidifier's water.
These are all things I've seen multiple times each.
by jerf - This seems to be a known technology but hasn't made it as a product.[1] It might have potential for very specific types of extinguishing, such as grills and grain silos, where the distance from extinguisher to trouble spot is fixed.by Animats
- The real barrier is that Big Extinguisher’s whole revenue model is based on bottle expiration dates.by nacozarina
- I will not ask if she patented it, or if others had the idea before, or if it is ready to be productized.
Just simply: it is great that young people, driven by personal curiosity, go and explore their ideas, find solutions to long-standing challenges.
Billiant, keep inventing!
by jll29